Reconditioning Rechargeable Batteries

A year or so ago, I purchased a cordless vacuum to use on my sailboat. There are a lot of brine flies out on the Great Salt Lake and they love to infiltrate the cabin of my boat where they die within a few hours. I used to just sweep them up but having a vacuum is much easier. The only problem is that rechargeable batteries don't last forever. Over the Memorial Day weekend we went to the boat only to discover the vacuum lasted about a minute or two before dying.

Sometimes the rechargeable batteries still have a charge and it is the charge controller that thinks it is dead. I brought the vacuum down to my office so I could play with it throughout the day. The first thing I discovered is that I could plug the charging cord into the vacuum and it would immediately tell me I had most of a charge. I quickly unplugged the vacuum and would use it for a minute before it died. I continued doing this 3 or 4 more times until the charge only lasted a second or two. Then I let the vacuum charge for several hours.

I hoped by running the battery down to truly nothing would reset the charge controller and I could get more than a minute or two of use. Just to get an accurate reading I started a stopwatch as I turned on the vacuum and began cleaning my office carpet. One minute and six seconds later, the vacuum shut off with a dead battery.

I looked up the user manual on the Internet and quickly scanned the entire book. I didn't find any help about how to replace the internal battery. About the only hope I came across is that it told me to take the device apart and remove the battery before throwing it away. The good news there is that I should be able to easily take the unit apart and remove the battery. Unfortunately the battery is soldered into the printed circuit board and is not meant to be replaced.

Fortunately I have been able to put the vacuum back together and now have to decide how much effort I want to put into fixing it. It would not be difficult to cut the wires from the battery and solder in a new one. Then again, for the price I paid for the thing, it might be easier to buy a new vacuum. Naturally it would be a different one. One with better batteries.

Technology in the Desert

I helped keep runners safe at the Salt Flats Endurance Run held earlier this month. It is something I do every year as it combines off-road driving with ham radio. For some reason crazy people enjoy running out in the desert and a select group of people go out and help make sure they stay safe. Interestingly enough, I think the volunteers outnumber the runners two or three to one. I should try and figure that out next year.

Normally my wife and I drive out to Aid Station 6 and set up camp for the day. We bring lots of drinks and food to help fuel the runners. Once we are done, we drive back the way we came over a very rough road that requires high-clearance vehicles. The runners continue on a trail that we can't follow as per Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rules. It takes us about 45 minutes to make the drive to Aid Station 5, which also happens to be Aid Station 7. There we wait for all the runners to safely make it in. This year we didn't have to.

In the past we have waited as our vehicles might be needed to get as close to the runners as possible before having to continue on foot. This year the radio crew at Aid Station 5/7 had a new toy: a drone. Instead of driving out a mile or two and hiking to look for lost runners, they could send a drone equipped with a camera as well as night vision. That allowed us to leave at a reasonable hour of 9pm and get home by 1am. Previous years has had us sticking around until midnight or later. That makes for a long day.

This year we hung around for a few minutes and then made the lengthy drive back to the start/finish line. We dropped off all of our extra food and some of the remnants of the runners' drop bags that we brought out to our aid station. While checking out with the race officials, we could hear on the radio the happenings at Aid 5/7 and the status of the last runner, slowly making his way to them. We knew he would take time as he barely made it to our aid station before the mandatory cutoff time. They sent the drone to locate him and did so as the marvelous piece of technology reached its maximum range before needing to return or risk running out of battery. On that news, my wife and I jumped into our Jeep Wrangler and drove home. It felt downright luxurious being home by 1am.

Using AI Appropriately

I had the pleasure of helping develop the PlayStation 5 video-game console when I worked in Research and Development at Sony Interactive Entertainment. One of the advantages of the hardware is that the file system is fast enough so it is not necessary to keep multiple copies of digital assets. What does that mean? When you create a virtual world, it is made up of a number of digital assets such as trees, rocks, buildings, or any number of other things we find in the real world. Most of the time, those assets are used over and over again. For the sake of an example, a forest is made up of a lot of trees. There may be only 5 different tree models created for a game and then they are reused many times to give the illusion of a forest. With the PS4, game designers would copy those 5 trees hundreds of times. That isn't necessary on a PS5 as you can have just the 5 tree types and point back to each one on the file system any time you need it. Assuming each tree requires 4KB of memory (an arbitrary value pulled out of thin air) and you have 1000 of each tree in a game, the PS4 would require 4MB for each tree used while the PS5 only needs 4KB. Theoretically PS5 games should be significantly smaller than for other game consoles. This becomes very helpful for games like Red Dead Redemption 2 that required 2 Blu-ray disks for the game. For physical game disks, it saves a bit of money and for digital downloads, they don't take as long to put on your system.

So what does that have to do with using AI appropriately? It boils down to why game developers only make 5 tree models. Most gamers don't slow down and look at every tree in a forest to see if it is different than all the others. So why take the time to create more than 5? If you can throw the problem at a generative AI program, you can let it create hundreds of different trees. This provides a level of uniqueness currently missing in a lot of games. This totally eliminates the benefit of the PS5 over other gaming consoles as its games once again become bloated. The reality is that while the PS5 doesn't require duplication of digital assets doesn't mean game studios are using the feature. You will still find copies of digital assets spread throughout quite a few games. Why not make the games more unique?

I have been thinking about this issue for the past couple of days and came up with another area where the use of AI should be applied. I walked through my kitchen this morning to get myself some breakfast. My floor is a high-quality laminate with a simulated pine surface. While pine is great looking, it is a very soft wood and makes horrible flooring that is easily scratched and dented. Using a high-quality laminate allows it to be almost indestructible yet look beautiful. The downside to a laminate is that there are only about 5 patterns on the boards. They repeat quite often and if you look closely you notice a lot of the boards are the same. The laminate floor company could use AI to create 100 different patterns instead of just 5. This would create a much more unique floor.

Yes these two solutions for generative AI don't seem to be high priority. After all if they were, companies would spend the effort to make their products more unique. The beauty of using AI is that products can become more unique and special without humans having to spend more time making it happen. You will still need those humans to fine-tune what is generated but their time can be spent being creative and not doing repetitive and mundane tasks.

 

Sextortion Should Be A Capital Offense

Recently someone came to me and asked for help after being a victim of sextortion. What is sextortion? Simply put, it is when someone coerces you into sending naked pictures of yourself and then tries to get you to pay money to keep from sending those pictures to your friends and family. Often times a bad actor will pose as a teenage girl and offer to exchange nude pictures with teenage boys. About the best advice I can give is just don't do it. That is often easier said than done though.

The unfortunate thing and why I think it should be a capital offense is that a large number of teenage boys have ended up committing suicide over sextortion schemes. Parents involved in these tragedies from different states have lobbied their legislatures to make the crime a felony, which it is as of today in Utah. Personally I don't think it is enough of a deterrent. Due to all of the lives that have been lost, I think we should be able to up the punishment so that a criminal that has caused a suicide should suffer the same punishment, death.

Now I know I am a bit harsh and many will point out that death-row inmates cost more than someone doing life in prison. I understand that. I also know that others will be upset at me for being so willing to take the life of another person. I only wish the criminals extorting money from teenage boys worried as much about the effects of their actions.

Unfortunately the reality is that with the ubiquity of the Internet, most bad actors dabbling in sextortion don't reside in the United States. When I wrote about this same subject half a decade ago, the e-mail started in Panama. I know there are other documented cases with criminals in various African countries. That means bad actors have some level of protection from prosecution in the United States.

So what can we do about sextortion? The first thing you can do is report it to the authorities. This includes local police and the FBI. The FBI's website where you can file a complaint is www.ic3.gov. You can also go to StopNCII.org to see about removing those images so they don't continue to propagate. Be forewarned that they have a 90% success rate. That is nowhere near the 100% we all hope for. Finally be prepared for all your friends and family to receive those embarrassing pictures. About the best you can do is respond with an apology when someone tells you they have been on the receiving end of those images.

To finish the story I started this post with, I advised the person not to pay the extortion fee. Once someone realizes you will pay, it only opens you up to more sextortion attempts later. A day later a number of friends and family received those compromising images. Everyone that received them reached out to the victim, showed support, and expressed concern. Nobody judged. We all have things in our lives we would like to keep private and don't want shared with the world which is why I never answer my phone in the bathroom. Friends and family understand that and won't rake you over the coals for a mistake you have made. 

Using Napkin.AI to Streamline Presentations

There is a lot of focus on artificial intelligence (AI) in the media right now. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. Yesterday I had a colleague ask me how I use AI in my job right now. I had to confess that I know lots of areas where it can be used, such as summarizing lengthy articles or generating complex code, but that I don't feel the need to use it. Then I thought back to when I created my last presentation. That is a classic example of where anyone can use AI to help.

I sit through a lot of presentations and hate it when someone creates overly-wordy slides. It makes for a very uninteresting presentation and is often called "Death by Powerpoint." When I find myself putting a bunch of text on a slide, I take a step back and try to figure out how to replace all the words with a simple picture. Sometimes that can be rather difficult and so I told my colleague that AI is a great way to streamline a presentation. We have an internal engine at Sony that we are encouraged to use. That keeps our confidential text from falling into the wrong hands.

My colleague asked if I had ever used napkin.ai, which is a website specifically designed to take presentation text and turn it into a picture. I immediately logged in and gave it a shot. I didn't have to create a new user or anything as I just logged in using my Google account. Then I copied some text from a personal document I had open and it generated several images for me to select. It worked amazingly well.

Should you find yourself trying to create a presentation and have a slide filled with text, I highly suggest you give napkin.ai a test. It may just help things become more easier to understand. Of course be sure not to input confidential or sensitive information as there is no guarantee it will remain so. 

Volunteering My Time

Today there are a select group of runners preparing to run 100 miles on the Salt Flats of Utah tomorrow. They will wake up early and try to complete the run in 36 hours. Some will hurry through the course while most will suffer. I have the luxury of driving my Jeep Wrangler on very rough roads out to the 40-mile aid station where I will provide water and food for the runners. I will also use ham radio to send their times to race control so family and friends know where they are on the course.

This is something I have done for the past decade or so and appreciate the chance to help out. One thing about ham radio which is also known as amateur radio is that you cannot be paid for it. That is the very definition of amateur. This is one of two ultra marathons that I help with every year and they are always an adventure.

One year helping with this race, I pulled into aid station 5 and heard air escaping from my right-rear tire. I continued to drive to my final destination, aid station 6 as the tire still had plenty of air. When we had a lull in the activity, my buddy pulled out his battery-powered impact wrench and we changed the tire like a NASCAR pit crew. The spare had never been used and needed a bit of air but Jeepers always carry air compressors and we easily filled the tire.

Another year we had someone get off course and find themselves in quicksand as the sun sank below the horizon. Fortunately the recording of runners at Aid Station 6 allowed the race organizers to know the last known location and the Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter quickly located the runner. The helicopter hovered above the quicksand and they were able to pull the person to safety. I will confess that the pilot may have gotten too close to the ground and almost got stuck himself.

There are countless more stories to tell but the message I want to share is that volunteering is important. There are lots of people that can use your help and so do your community a favor and look for opportunities to help out. You won't be rewarded monetarily but you will be compensated in many other ways.